Six Modern Masters of India

Masters? - well, who were the masters till the other day? A few names named, as with Moghul or Basholi miniatures, for the rest an almost complete blank as far as this part of art were concerned. But, and nevertheless, masterpieces were assured. Far fewer are the masters names handed down from the ancient lndic cultures. But the given sub-continental geography would certainly not by itself deserve the appellation 'India' but for its great monuments teeming with carvings and sculptures. But much of the new age - at least as it is reflected in the culture of our magnum towns - is exclusively wedded to its few hours or days. Consequently, we perforce become each our own self centres. In this way we do of course honour the makers of the arts or other creative personages, except that the value of works of art perforce is to be realistically gauged only against those created deep in the past. When this is not done we are really taking blind shots, groping in the dark. In this way, we are but creatures of time and circumstance.

Well, at least I strongly feel such limitation, though desperately trying to get an over-view but one which does not easily oblige. Only from time to time, by grace unknown, do you happen to stand in the museum without walls, and thus armed with the perceptions or stimuli coming from over there, you approach your own small patch of life activity with some confidence. Then the art one is exposed to in the living moment is half in and half out of time present. Perhaps then, and that only by luck, a truer guess at its worth is come about. But, and normally, there is no such spiritual exercise, and so perforce one is content with whatever is, not mindlessly of course, but being acutely self-conscious as to the daunting relativity of subject and object.

I say the foregoing with some due introspection, though the painters in this show are certainly the masters for me, having known them closely through the years, they almost being part and parcel of one's own flesh, one's ego. How may it be otherwise? Kumars have had on their walls some other masters of the Indian art scene no doubt. But these ones here are all sound ones, without the shadow of a doubt, and deserve the title. They have deserved it by dint of hard work, and much application. They make a bit of modern Indian history, and we the viewers, have been witness to its making through the years. Since living in time present, at moments, we hear of their occasional shortcomings does not in the least make us dispute their standing in the field. One has enjoyed their works. over and again, from time to time, place to place, through about a half century.

At the same time one's peers and superiors, in the art of looking, taught us how approach works such as these. Thanks to them are due as much as to the artists themselves. The chosen among the art savants could lucidly discourse on the Indian art of the day, and transpose pictorial values into words. With the best of them a mere sentence would suffice, not many words were needed, for they were exact. These critics were concerned with the object in view and not with their emotions. On the other hand some emotionalists among the critics longed to share their sensations and convert us to their ways of seeing. At the best of times, they stimulated comparisons and splendid discussion. As long as these critics did not theorize over much they opened one's eyes to the actual works.

The truest lovers of art tended to be silent. But still, of those who did write on these painters well was Charles Fabri, in Delhi. His debt had better be acknowledged, even as one goes on to say some few words on the eminent painters in this show.

Now if I treat of Maqbool Fida Husain first, I do so for good reason, since he is the best known of the artists on the subcontinent, even as he is the senior-most; and also perhaps the most Indian in manner and inspiration. In this show his works, like Vasant, Riders and Spirit of Freedom are typical of him but do not tell of all his other rich talent, as film-maker or poet.

Husain has been the most influential painter since the 1950's. His contribution is significant in terms of the bulk of his output, as well as, at its best, in terms of quality. He has been instrumental in inspiring the younger, or budding painters, especially in western and northern India, to take the bull of art by the horns boldly. That in the process he himself has from time to time overstepped the parameters of art proper, and gone for mere gestures does not however detract from his stature in the annals of recent Indian art. Husain is both an excellent draughtsman and a fine colourist. At the same time his subject matter is pointedly local, indigenous. He has used the whole spectrum of Indian myths and folk-lore to striking effects. His fascination with Hanuman is not incidental, perhaps it represents his own attitude to life in general, of being ever active and restless.

Husain's earliest paintings display bright colours, and the application there is flat and, as also, his forms are playfully puppet like. But still, though Husain uses traditional colours he is nevertheless entirely contemporary. Some of his work being neo-cubistic, and a whole lot of his paintings can be divided into several sections. The painter never naively copies nature, but brings it to us in jerky,.very lively fits and starts. In other words he is not a bland maker of pretty pictures. His lines are sharp, rapid and determined. Then, if the painter is modern in idiom, he is very much a man of his own varied moods, and unmodern in that he is not overly self-conscious but quite at ease with the world around him in all its varied colours. His skills, and his imagination are combined with a deep intuition to create an art that can be 'placed' and is not international or merely anonymous.

Husain is a protean painter, restless by very nature, for instance his cubist drawing is put to novel uses, even as it does justice to local material. In many of these works he keeps the viewer on his toes, with never a sign of dullness or creative exhaustion. The best of some of the cubist work was done during the fifties, and the painter has continued expanding his horizon, to undertake other forms of experiments such as installations and the happenings. Resultantly, there is ever fresh treatment of new themes from his hands. Compositions with long limbed, athletic females are treated with great verve. At the same time he has done composite works like Aswamedh, a metal piece generously enriched by light and sound effects. Such experiments have been intellectualy interesting for the viewer. But of course it is in his early paintings where we meet with a genuine synthesis of the east and west.

And then we have Satish Gujral, with one work reproduced here from the painful and emotionally surcharged past, and the others in an another, a high spirited vein. In-between lies a very large body of rich contribution. His Burnt Woods and his architecture are only two examples of the same. The most compelling works of this extraordinary human being are not mere titillants, and they do not merely reflect a fragmented consciousness but rather Iinkup with the living human community. With his Burnt Woods, for instance, is stimulated our whole racial memory. In this sense the artist connects us with the past effectively. These and other creations are entirely animated and highly rhythmic, as well as beautifully designed. The three dimensionality of certain of the compositions makes for truth and an impressive, commanding tenderness, indeed a lyrical sensuality is part of the genre. The peak of this artist's works are unique, magical, almost religious in seriousness as also a sense of mystery.

Artists, such as Satish, are inquisitive about all things, but with a purpose. In his best works he subordinates himself to necessity but without surrendering to the obligatory freedom of his ego. The variety of ideas are carried sportingly and without solemnity. The spirit behind his chosen works is a kind of play, art for him being the most interesting of pursuits to be played with masterful skill. His successful works in this show are characterized by all the delight and vividness of the game of life and in which ones sundry faculties are engaged for the sake of the same. Such gamesmanship was already apparent in the artist's metal sculptures but which found a fresh incarnation in his wood work and later still in art and architecture of a wide variety instinct with imagination. There is a great deal of informality in the genuinely creative and Satish Gujral appears to keep company with this very band the world over.

When the true chronical of contemporary Indian art comes to be written, Tyeb Mehta will be seen as one of its benefactors. These future recorders may say that Indian art had spread its empire over a vast territory without being able to master it; that the deeper aims of the artistic activity were often overlooked in favour of quick but superficial acclaim, that much figurative art was lost in superficial trival anecdote - in mere sensational sketches or didactic denunciations, in the wont to use crude realistic images, in sophisticated obscenity. This future reviewer will find some .of our abstract compositions awkwardly acrobating with the grammer of art, rather than using the same towards reawakening in the viewer any profound experience of reality etc etc.

Now Tyeb Mehta is one of those Indian artists who have for long maintained a steady keel, not letting go of the delicate balance, or the dialectic between means and ends. He uses his skill to achieve depth in his compositions rather than width of repertoire. As in the case of some other. serious minded painters, such following of the strait and narrow may at moments appear as a kind of fundamentalism, but at least in his case the conclusion is misleading: It is true that he did for a period of time seem stationary caught unwittingly in the inertia of his Falling Figures, but arrests are common in the life of painters.

But now looking at his several Kalis, as the one here, the 'plot' .thickens The manner gather more density and momentum as much does the integration of the separate strokes in the composition. It makes for pictorial power. The interpretation of the painter's message ought be left to our subconscious - the wisdom of the heart not needing a tome of learned allusions to feel the weight of the best especially where the deep blue has been used, is enough. There is much satisfaction in sensing the compression and condensation of an otherwise unmanageable reality. Thus both on the sensory as the ideational plane we are commanded to shun the second rate.

Going over F.N. Souza's works over here, particularly his ram rod straight Head in Blue, one asks oneself as to which is the artist's characteristic stance? Answer is emphaticness. His right side up, straight-spined dramatis personae are poised frontally often looking you in the eye, so to speak. Confronting you head on these of his works never wobble, so taut and crisp are they. At the same time they know no indirection, no warded look. Thus no shy femininity either in his inner spirit. This therefore is the work of a man, the one bent on mastery, and overly willful.

Even the way the painter lays his paint shows he is self assured with little self doubt. And, invariably, he goes for the most robust gesture even in his landscapes, not only figurations, and all of which is chiselled as if in granite. In Souza' s veins seems to run a trace of the determined Vasco da Gama blood. He also seems to have been baptized in the church of the bull painting Spanish master. But thus inspired the painter makes the influence a matter of genuine faith. This bluntness suits him well. And if we call this artistic fun, the painter has had plenty of it.

In this show there is one of the finest of the Bandwallas series by Krishen Khanna. But similar themes were like the one on the Truckwallas. All had been skillfully treated by the painter over the years. Among his finer works has also been his Watermelon Eater sequence. The painter at the same time draws upon his Lahore childhood days, or as in the Zam Zama cannon, or using the British named roads as descriptive material. The best of these works do have an inherent electricity to them, as do the quieter works looking back on his ancestry. All these compositions are soft spoken and with a mellowed patina of paint. The paint is carefully kneaded and an earlier prose gives place to verse or to the slow jazz of purring warm colours. The separate outlines of the drawn figures at the back is unassertive. The Zam Zama itself is a notation in colour, not strict form. What works like these, by an eminent painter entail is the skill of seeing, for there is nothing facile .about them. Only then will they grow on you. The glow in the Bandwallas is as if hidden behind a layer of purposive ash, and that precisely is the subtlety of the work. The enjoyment is that of texture and we ought respond to it viscerally, not merely mentally.

This painter has done very different orders of work throughout the years, right from the Japanese Sumi-e to Che Guvera, and now there is the search into his own roots of much distinction.

Ram Kumar, a foremost maker of the landscapes of mind is the least garrulous of the artists. The painter in Ram Kumar matured early. An entirely private person, he. does not compromise easily and not at all with fashion. He therefore hides himself from the prying eyes of the viewers. And still his works, like Varanasi, convey the truth of nature, and of his own temperament abundantly in sideways glances and sharp brush strokes. He is at pains to preserve the secret self at all cost in our rather excessively public day. The main thing in his works in this mood is one of nostalgia. This is best reflected via somber grey or slate hues. The painter does not believe in excess or fireworks but sobriety all through. Ram Kumar therefore creates no ostensibly brilliant works, but reliable ones. Here is genuine authenticity - the one at the bottom of the sea, or maybe atop a high mountain. To each his own.

- Keshav Malik